The Candidate Discovers Plastics

This is an intensely political year, and so I chose to catch up with a 1972 film that American political junkies often reference. At a time when Richard Nixon was winning re--election, The Candidate focused on a fictional California race for the U.S. Senate, one that seemed to reward the value of style over substance, suggesting the evolution of politics into a beauty contest in which the best-looking candidate wins. And they don’t get much better looking than the young Robert Redford, who was the film’s star.

Coincidentally, Redford came close to winning the title role in 1967’s The Graduate, in which “plastics” stood in for all that was crass in the modern world. Plastics in The Graduate was something that recent big-man-on-campus Benjamin Braddock was determined to resist in his adult life. In The Candidate, Redford plays Bill McKay, an idealistic young California activist with cover-boy looks. When the film opens, he has absolutely no use for political game-playing; obviously this is a reaction against his father (Melvyn Douglas), a seasoned political pro who was once the governor of the state. Because the Republican incumbent, Senator Crocker Jarmon, seems to have a lock on the upcoming election, the Democratic party hack played by Peter Boyle only needs to find a patsy to be Jarmon’s token opponent. He persuades Bill to run by pledging he’ll have full independence to state his own views.

But wait! Bill captures the public’s fancy, and soon Boyle’s character is reshaping him into a bland but attractive golden-boy who can steal the Senate seat from the ageing silver fox currently holding the office. It’s made clear, especially in a televised debate scene, that neither of them is going to go beyond platitudes and nice-sounding slogans. At times Bill fights against his makeover (which includes a trendy new haircut and wardrobe), but everyone, including his loving wife, is soon pressuring him to play the game. He reluctantly accepts his father’s involvement, though he cringes at Dad’s proud acknowledgment that he’s become a politician.

In an age when the differences between Democrats and Republicans are marked by deliberately divisive rhetoric, it’s fascinating to recognize that there was a time, among national  political candidates, when bland was beautiful, when the whole point of campaigning was to bank on personal appeal. It often worked: an acquaintance of my mother was a big supporter of Vice-Presidential candidate Dan Quayle because she found him “cute.” Good looks and personal magnetism are still, of course, highly useful in politics. But what’s striking about The Candidate is that neither man dares to really express an opinion. After seeing the film, I checked on the actual U.S. Senators who represented California in the 1960s and 1970s, discovering that most of them were an undistinguished lot. Though the serious and hard-working Alan Cranston held one of the California seats from 1969 to 1993, the other passed through the hands of Pierre Salinger (JFK’s former press secretary, who served less than a year), George Murphy (a Hollywood song-and-dance man), John Tunney (a young lawyer with Ivy League cred), and S.I. Hayakawa (a noted linguist and university president who entered the Senate at age 71). Hayakawa, who was embraced by conservatives after he came down hard on student protestors at San Francisco State, is best remembered for dozing off during Senate hearings.

It’s Tunney who comes closest to Redford’s character. The son of champion heavyweight boxer Gene Tunney, he was propelled into politics by name recognition, a Ted Kennedy link (they were law-school roommates), and clean-cut youthful good looks. What did he accomplish? Not much.

Audra McDonald: Culturus Interruptus

I’m a huge fan of Broadway singer and actress Audra McDonald, who brings passion, nuance, and a peerless soprano voice to every musical role she undertakes. Her long string of Tony Awards recognizes her success in a variety of stage vehicles, everything from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel (where she made theatre history as an African-American Carrie Pipperidge) to Ragtime to Porgy and Bess. She’s been acknowledged for non-singing roles too, notably in a Broadway revival of Lorraine Hansbury’s classic A Raisin in the Sun. I treasure the recordings in which she reveals her sharp timing, her sense of humor, and her affection for the work of new composers, especially women. Now 50, she’s an American treasure.

I’ve several times enjoyed her stage performances. But of course all that’s a thing of the past in this era of COVID-19. We who love live theatre and concerts sadly recognize that it will be a long, long time before we can leave home to get a culture-fix . The Internet, augmented by various technological platforms, can give us an emotional lift by presenting great stars in an up-close-and-personal format. At least, that’s the idea. Unfortunately, just when we’re thinking it’s safe to enjoy ourselves online, technology tends to throw us a curve.

Early in the lockdown, a star-studded live Zoom tribute to Stephen Sondheim had musical theatre buffs counting the minutes to “curtain-time.” (One of many promised treats was McDonald singing a sloshed shelter-in-place version of “The Ladies Who Lunch” with chums Christine Baranski and Meryl Streep.) Alas, grating technical difficulties delayed the opening of the broadcast for at least 45 minutes while we fans lurked around our computers, desperate for the show to start.

Then last weekend I actually paid for a link to an intimate musical tête-à-tête between Audra and pianist Seth Rudetsky , as part of his now-online Seth Concert Series. Rudetsky’s personality may require some getting used to, but he’s a master accompanist, and clearly Audra’s a longtime pal. From their separate homes they performed old songs and new, interspersed with behind-the-scenes stories and easy banter. But . . . midway through the performance (for which I had shelled out $25) of such artful scat as a Streisand-inspired  “Down With Love” medley or a breath-taking ballad like “You Are Your Daddy’s Son” (from Ragtime), the screen would suddenly freeze, leaving me pining for the intricate passage or the last thrilling notes I’d missed. (Happily, the concert organizers gave me a second chance to see the show in its entirety—and it worked!)

As a versatile performer, McDonald has also played a number of film and TV roles, Few, though, have allowed her to sing, and when it comes to meaty parts I’m certain that her African-American heritage has held her back. On the webcast she told a pertinent story dating back to a TV performance of Annie, shot in 1999 as part of The Wonderful World of Disney. She was very pleased to be cast as Grace Farrell, good-hearted secretary to Daddy Warbucks (Victor Garber): she gets rewarded in the last scene with her boss’s proposal of marriage. Then, after the production had wrapped, word came from on high that the marriage proposal would have to go, or risk alienating the Southern markets. The dispirited cast re-assembled on a Saturday (at enormous expense) to re-shoot the scene. Young director Rob Marshall shot one take, quickly and sloppily, and called it a wrap. He knew what he was doing: making it impossible not to choose the original ending. Which—hooray!—proceeded to air with absolutely no furor at all. 

The Fire Next Time: Fahrenheit 451

When bestselling author Susan Orlean decided to burn a book, she settled on a copy of a Ray Bradbury classic, Fahrenheit 451. Orlean, not normally a pyromaniac (or a book-burner), performed this stunt as part of her research for The Library Book, chronicling the Great Los Angeles Public Library fire of 1986, in which 400,000 books were destroyed. Arson may, nor may not, have sparked the cataclysm. When she set Bradbury’s work aflame, Orlean discovered in herself “elation at the fluid beauty of fire, and a terrible fright at the seductiveness of it and the realization of how fast a thing full of human stories can be made to disappear.”  Her choice of Fahrenheit 451 for this experiment was apt: Bradbury’s novella, of course, predicts a future society in which books are illegal and must be burned to a crisp. (I’ll be leading a discussion comparing Orlean’s and Bradbury’s works tomorrow evening, as part of Santa Monica Public Library’s annual Santa Monica Reads program. Over Zoom, needless to say. Y’all come!) 

Bradbury wrote his novella early in his much-storied career, in 1953. It helped make him famous worldwide. In 1966, during an era of widespread youthful rebellion against the status quo, the story was filmed by François Truffaut, making his only foray into English-language cinema. Truffaut remained largely faithful to the Bradbury text, leading up to the shivery conclusion in which bands of rebels who have committed to memory the great texts of the past wander out into the snowy landscape that is a far cry from the decadent, book-free city. His one big change (intensely disliked by Bradbury) involved the casting of It-girl Julie Christie as both of the book’s two key female characters. At the center of Bradbury’s novel is a fireman, Montag, who discovers in himself the urge to read books instead of burning them. (The movie, much more European than American in feel, casts Oskar Werner in that role.) Early on, Montag finds inspiration in Clarisse, an ethereal neighbor with a great forbidden love for nature and the written word. She’s his dream-girl, but his wife Mildred is a down-to-earth harridan with a closed mind. Mildred feels enthusiasm only for the kitschy mass media doled out by the repressive society in which they make their home. (Apart from the otherworldly Clarisse, women don’t come off well in Bradbury’s novella, serving mostly as mindless shrews and pawns, not as authors or as the quiet rebels memorizing otherwise lost literary works. This is one of many ways in which Bradbury’s sometimes prescient Fahrenheit 451 is also pure 1950s in its mindset.)

Feeling that Truffaut had not had the last word about Bradbury’s novella, writer-director Rahmin Bahrani made it a passion project, which he brought to HBO in 2018. In part, his revisiting of the Fahrenheit 451 material is a triumph: his visuals of a nighttime city dominated by neon and huge public video screens smartly brings the Bradbury world into the 21^st century. He has cut some the sillier aspects of Bradbury’s novella (the hideous wife, the lethal mechanical hound who pursues our hero), and his images of fire lapping at the pages of famous books (including recent titles by female authors like Toni Morrison) are hard to shake. Unfortunately, his grasp of his characters is less commendable. The crucial relationship between Montag (Michael P. Jordan) and his captain (Michael Shannon) remains ill-defined. And Bahrani feels compelled to introduce as a McGuffin a mysterious device called an “omnis” that provides a hopeful but unlikely ending. Too bad he got fired up but then lost his way.